2 Table of contents Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................................. 5 Figures ................................................................................................................................................. 6 Tables .................................................................................................................................................. 7 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 8 Development of homeownership rates ............................................................................................. 14 Explanations in the existing literature ............................................................................................. 19 New explanation and outline ............................................................................................................ 28 Part I. Germany, nation of renters ................................................................................................. 33 1. Critical juncture, the 19th-century: the creation of compact rental cities .............................. 33 1.1 Town planning by liberal municipalities ................................................................................. 38 1.2 Housing finance differences ...................................................................................................... 50 1.3 Traditional Handwerk in the Empire ....................................................................................... 71 2. Paths not taken, legacies and reinforcing mechanisms ............................................................ 77 2.1 Urban development as “layering” ............................................................................................ 84 2.2 Housing finance continuity ........................................................................................................ 89 2.3 Rental construction industry vs. trade-based individual homes ......................................... 101 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 110 Part II. United States, nation of homeowners ............................................................................. 112 1.1 The creation of suburbanized cities ........................................................................................ 112 1.2 Building and Loans .................................................................................................................. 126 1.3 Traditional construction industry .......................................................................................... 146 2. 20th-century legacies ................................................................................................................... 155 3 2.1 Private city continued .............................................................................................................. 161 2.2 SLAs instead of non-profit housing ........................................................................................ 167 2.3 Mass production in the construction industry ...................................................................... 174 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 182 Part III. Hybrid France ................................................................................................................. 183 1. The heritage of the Ancien régime ............................................................................................ 183 1.1 Lagging municipal reforms ..................................................................................................... 187 1.2 Financial-system structure and homeownership .................................................................. 210 1.3. Grands ensembles interlude vs. the creation of individual mass housing ........................... 221 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 228 General conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 230 (1) The argument finalized ............................................................................................................. 230 (2) Generalization over cases: Anglo-Saxon vs. central-continental housing regimes ............... 237 (3) Generalizing the explanation type: towards a sociology of markets for durables .................. 240 Appendix ......................................................................................................................................... 244 1) German city data analysis ......................................................................................................... 244 Literature ........................................................................................................................................ 245 4 Acknowledgments I foremost would like to thank my supervisors and jury members Jens Beckert, Pierre François, Patrick Le Galès and Martin Höpner as well as Leonard Seabrooke, as external advisor, for their supervision and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CSO) under Christine Musselin and the Franco-German University for financial and institutional support. For advice concerning literature and data sources, for comments and proof-reading I would furthermore like to thank the following persons: participants of the Copenhagen “Shelter or Storm” workshop and the Cologne “Mieternation Deutschland” IW-workshop, of the MaxPo “Economic Moralities” graduate conference and the ENS Seminaire logement, the members of the doctoral staff at the MPIfG, in particular Daniel Mertens, Lukas Haffert, Timur Ergen and Barbara Fulda, and the CSO, in particular Damien Krichewsky, Hugo Bertillot, Pascal Braun, Simon Paye, Teis Hansen; Michael Voigtländer, Claire Lemercier, Jürgen Friedrichs, Patrik Aspers, Philip Korom, Francesco Boldizzoni, Michael Hochgeschwender, Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Ferwerda, David Gosselin, Emilia Bompadre, Sebastian Rojek, Kerstin Konkol, Zigor Sangura. A special thanks goes to the library employees of the MPIfG who, tirelessly, provided me with the necessary reading material. 5 Figures Figure 1: International homeownership rates ............................................................................. 17 Figure 2: HRs of case studies ...................................................................................................... 17 Figure 3: Urban homeownership and single-family house rates ................................................ 18 Figure 4: People per building in various cities and countries ..................................................... 39 Figure 5: Building stock structure in various countries .............................................................. 47 Figure 6: Varieties of urban form and tenure .............................................................................. 48 Figure 7: Pre-WWI mortgage market volumes in million Marks ............................................... 54 Figure 8: Cooperative number and membership development ................................................... 61 Figure 9: Century-lagged correlation of HRs and single-family house shares ........................... 78 Figure 10: New residential construction by number of units in structure ................................... 89 Figure 11: Interwar mortgage market share by source of financer ............................................. 96 Figure 12: Post-WWII mortgage market share by lending bank ................................................ 96 Figure 13: Percentage of apartment-ownership of all housing units in German Länder ............ 99 Figure 14: New construction by prefabrication type ................................................................ 102 Figure 15: Residential non-farm outstanding mortgage in million dollars ............................... 135 Figure 16: Time series of HRs in Toronto and Montreal .......................................................... 151 Figure 17: Number of units per building in 1941 in percent of entire housing stock ............... 153 Figure 18: One-century correlations between the 2005 and 1920 HRs, the percentage of one- family houses in a sample of American cities .......................................................................... 155 Figure 19: Decline of mass transit (millions of miles) ............................................................. 163 Figure 20: Railroad developments ............................................................................................ 164 Figure 21: Housing starts in thousands according to the building type .................................... 168 Figure 22: Percentage share in non-farm housing held by different mortgagees ..................... 168 Figure 23: German building 2000 construction by primary material used ............................... 179 Figure 24: Percentage of new construction according to primary exterior wall material: ........ 179 Figure 25: Absolute (1000s) and relative numbers of housing starts of manufactured units